2011's property hotspots

Two new surveys by Zoopla and Halifax look at the towns and cities where prices rose the most last year.

Two new surveys have looked at the property hotspots of 2011 across the UK. Woking in Surrey topped Halifax’s annual report while Wigan in Lancashire headed up property website Zoopla’s list.

Let’s take a look at the two surveys and their methodology in turn.

Halifax survey

Halifax looked at 130 towns across the UK using mortgage offers from its own house price database.

It says that, on average using those calculations, UK house prices fell by 4% between December 2010 and 2011. And the average UK house price in 2011 was £172,400.

Here are the 10 towns that have experienced the highest price rises, according to Halifax:

Town	Average house price 2010	Average house price 2011	Annual change
Woking	£257,590	£299,654	16%
Falkirk	£113,422	£126,548	12%
Ipswich	£151,448	£165,749	9%
Inverness	£154,369	£168,580	9%
Portsmouth	£139,200	£150,901	8%
Crewe	£124,994	£132,873	6%
Worthing	£205,390	£218,269	6%
Bridgend	£118,551	£125,936	6%
Enfield	£229,240	£243,421	6%
Rugby	£150,422	£159,076	6%

Halifax says both Woking and Falkirk’s proximity to big cities – London and either Glasgow or Edinburgh respectively – were major reasons why prices continued to grow.

Kettering in Northamptonshire and Dunfermline were the towns where prices fell the most – by 15% in both cases. Prices in Hartlepool dropped by 14%, while there were drops of 13% in Ayr, Belfast and Ashford in Kent.

Overall, 28% of the towns surveyed saw some increase in house prices over the course of 2011.

Zoopla survey

Property website Zoopla examined price changes across Britain’s cities (note that it doesn’t have prices for Northern Ireland) using its price estimator tool, which crunches various numbers to produce an estimate of house prices.

It says that the average price in Britain was down by just 0.38% in 2011, or £84.

Here are the top 10 best-performing cities, according to Zoopla:

City	Average house price 2010	Average house price 2011	Annual change
Wigan	£125,460	£132,517	5.62%
Aberdeen	£201,070	£209,706	4.30%
Ipswich	£178,642	£185,508	3.84%
Cardiff	£182,547	£188,955	3.51%
Edinburgh	£220,515	£227,516	3.17%
Dundee	£144,469	£148,315	2.66%
Plymouth	£162,595	£166,887	2.64%
York	£215,352	£220,595	2.43%
Bournemouth	£219,073	£224,315	2.39%
Cambridge	£302,848	£308,914	2.00%

The worst-performing cities were Newcastle, with a drop of 5.51%, Leicester (4.61%) and Bolton (4%).

Scotland was the only one of the three nations to record an average price rise, with prices going up by 6.73%, well above the British average. By contrast, prices in England fell by 0.75% and in Wales by 0.11%.

More: Property predictions for 2012 | How house prices have changed around the world

For the latest news on the stories that affect your money, follow us on Twitter